Brand monitoring - What are the benefits and what can I monitor?
Brand monitoring is the strategic and proactive monitoring and analysis of a brand's growth, reputation and associated brand content. It’s carried out through the investigation of media and online sources, to unearth, report on and respond to different conversations and awareness around brands or a specific brand and their competitors.
Brand monitoring tools or platforms monitor content from the web, whether that’s news articles, blogs, web pages or social networks. They provide in-depth data analysis on what, how and when there are discussions taking place surrounding a brand, a competitor or a client.
What are the benefits of monitoring my brand or my competitors?
- Tells you how people are receiving your brand on various forms of media and how it’s being discussed
- Pinpoints any negative sentiment related to your brand that needs to be addressed
- Provides a detailed overview of brand perception that supports and impacts any future product or marketing strategies
- Highlights the consumer reaction to your brand or competitor’s brand upon the release of a new product or campaign
- Understand the audience discussing both your brand and category to plan marketing and communication strategies
Brand monitoring is also hugely beneficial for market research - as you can put together information and insights that are relevant to specific topics and keywords surrounding your brand. This provides a platform toward new and improved campaign strategies informed by reliable market research. With social listening platforms you are able to monitor your own brands and gather advanced insights based on the performance of your own social channels. Thanks to advance technologies of today - AI and data visualization provide a clearer, deeper understanding of how the content associated with your brand has reached its dedicated audience.
What is there to monitor?
Branded Keywords
Before you delve too deep into the industry you’re operating in, the first step is to monitor your own brand. You should look to track your brand name first - but make sure you also include variations of how your brand may be perceived online - such as acronyms, misspellings and common phrases.
If there’s a word associated with your brand name that can be used in a similar context - these are just as important. It also helps to track phrases that include your brand name - perhaps a short description afterwards, such as ‘Coca-Cola soft drink’
Topics and industry trends
Here you should be monitoring the big picture view of the topic you’re looking to cover. Start searching for key topics associated with your brand.
This provides you with insights surrounding phrases your audience use to talk about key topics in your industry. You can then start to pinpoint certain trends that can benefit your content and marketing campaigns.
To get an even better view of topic and industry trends, you can start to focus on web search data and the analytics behind your website. With brand monitoring platforms you can take the same keywords relevant to specific topics and industry trends and see how often they are searched for using search engines.
Influencers and industry micro-influencers
There are so many influencers taking to social media these days that the world of social is becoming somewhat saturated. However, with the help of micro-influencers – individuals with between 1000 and 10,000 followers on a social media platform – there’s still the opportunity to benefit your individual brand strategies.
The reason micro-influencers are so vital to understanding your audience - as well as a key component of brand monitoring - is that they both exemplify and influence your overall audience as well as the individual segments within that audience.
If you can come up with a group of micro-influencers using brand monitoring tools, you can use them for testing out new content strategies or marketing campaigns.
The best way to find micro-influencers is - you guessed it - brand monitoring. You can delve into conversations surrounding topics relevant to your brand to identify social accounts engaging with these the most who have a significant number of followers. These are your micro-influencers.
Brand monitoring is now becoming an essential asset to the success of a business - not only because it gives you a better understanding of your audience. It also influences much of what your brand represents, as well as how your brand is represented.
With brand monitoring you can significantly improve your understanding of what makes a successful marketing and communication strategy - and stay ahead of the competition as you continuously learn what’s working - and what isn’t - in real time.